Stan Lee's presentation at the D.I.C.E. Summit on Tuesday was a highlight for many in attendance. The master creator of comic book heroes addressed the subject of building depth into characters in all areas of art.

　　But he offered more than advice to take back to one's development studio. He offered a vision of what it might be like to devote one's entire life to the creative process.

　　We spoke with Lee after he delivered his presentation.

　　GameSpot: You had a great line today, Stan. You said: "To be a good designer, you have to be a very violent psychopath." Good laugh. But my question is serious: Because the realism in games is so great, do you ever lament how much violence surfaces in them?

　　Stan Lee: I'm not a lover of violence. I like action. And to me there's a difference between action and violence. And I don't think violence is necessary. I think to a great extent it's a substitute for coming up with another clever device to do something. I know violence seems to be the prevailing mood today, but it's not something that I particularly enjoy.

　　GS: Now, you have a company (POW) that you mentioned, and you said games were going to be one of the legs that the company would stand on. What kinds of games are you hoping to create?

　　SL: Well, I'll start by looking at all of the big games that are out there and refresh myself. And then I'll try to think of something that's different. That sounds simple, but it won't be that simple, but I'll say to myself, "OK, they have this, they have that, they have that… Now, what do they not have that would interest me if I were a game player?" And I'll try to think of that type of thing. I think I'll be able to.

　　GS: Where do you look for your raw material?

　　SL: Nowhere.

　　GS: Stan!

　　SL: Inside my head, I guess. I'm not a big fan of research and reference, mainly because I've never had the time. When I worked at Marvel, we had dozens of books that had to be printed every month, and I had to be [quick]. Luckily, I'm a fast writer. If I weren't, I couldn't have done what I did. So there was never time to research things.

　　GS: Can you give me a "for example"?

　　SL: For example, when I wanted Spider-Man Peter Parker to get his spider power, I said, well, he'll be bitten by a radioactive spider. That's as much research as I did. The Hulk, I figured, well, let's see, he'll be exposed to gamma bomb rays. Gamma rays…I don't know what a gamma ray is. I haven't had the time to look it up. But it sounded good.

　　Research is a wonderful thing, but I've never had the time to do it. I write fiction anyway. So I like to make up my own worlds and my own situations. But to answer your question, I think the most important thing is to give a game player some type of exciting story that he hasn't seen before.

　　GS: Do you consider yourself someone who has natural talents, or did you have to train yourself to come up with these scenarios and these characters?

　　SL: I wouldn't know how to train myself to do it. I think it has to be natural. Just like a tap dancer or a musician. You study a little bit, but it's got to be in you. I've always enjoyed writing stories, even when I was a kid, and I was always good, in school, in composition and in English. So it all came pretty naturally to me.

　　GS: You spent much of your life creating characters that are larger than life, that are superhuman. How do you relate to those characters? Are they mere creations, or do they have a sense of reality to you? Do they have real form and mass to you?

　　SL: They have to, I think, even though they're bigger than life. They have a superpower. But aside from that, I try to make them normal human beings with personal lives and personal problems. I don't think you have to be the kind of person you write about to write about it well. I don't know that Edgar Rice Burrows had ever been in the jungle. I don't know that H.G. Wells had ever seen an invisible man. You just dream things up.

　　GS: What do you think comic books are going to look like and feel like in 100 years?

　　SL: God, I have no idea. I'm not a good prophet. But I know that today, because they're able to color them with computers, the artwork is much richer looking, and some of the pages, some of the drawings, look like paintings. I think it'll become more of an art form as time goes on, but that's anybody's guess.

　　GS: Do you view video games as a valid art form?

　　SL: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely! Video games are a combination of movies, novels, comic books, everything. They move, but they have great stories, they have action, they're a feast for the eyes. Of course they're an art form.

　　GS: It sounds like you spend quite a bit of time engaged in video games, I mean playing them. Do you?

　　SL: No, no I don't.

　　GS: So how do you…

　　SL: I've seen them. I look at them. I don't have the time to play them, and I'd be terrible at it if I did. I'm sure if I spent a week doing it I would be pretty good at it, but I don't have the week.

　　GS: What do you bring back from an event like this?

　　SL: It has been a very pleasant event, and some of the questions I've been asked even made me think more about video games. But in all honesty, when I get back, I'll get so enmeshed in my own work, that that's it. I just get back to my normal routine. I hop from thing to thing. I'll be working on an idea for a movie that I hope to sell, or a movie that we're developing now, then I'll go to a TV thing or an animated show we're working on. And then we have some appointments to talk about video games. I'm eager to get into that, and we're also doing work with these cell phones where you have little productions on the phone. We're doing stories for those. So there's a lot going on.

　　GS: Thanks, Stan.